"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland,
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,
Who rules the World-Island and the various Choke points commands the world"
"Force does not reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary,it invests the victims with patience"
Honesty, integrity, ethics, morality, Truth just might be a more effective path to real Justice.
USA is yet much too drunk of its own illusions to see the writings on the walls Worldwide.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Iran and the Fallacy of Saber-Rattling...

Iran and the
Fallacy of Saber-Rattling...

Among several broadly held misconceptions about Iran is that to get Iranians
to make concessions we want them to make at the negotiating table the United
States must credibly threaten to inflict dire harm on them—specifically, with
military force—if they do not make the concessions. Some in the United States
(and some in Israel) who are especially keen on promoting this notion would
welcome a war. If war preparations and brinksmanship used to communicate such a
threat lead the two nations to stumble into an accidental war—and there is a
real danger they might—so much the better from their point of view. But the
belief in saber-rattling as an aid to gaining an agreement in the negotiations
over Iran's nuclear program extends to many who actually want an agreement and
are not seeking a war. We have heard more about this lately in connection with
Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense. People ask whether this
nominee, who has evinced an appreciation of the huge downsides of a war with
Iran, would be able to rattle the saber as convincingly as the same people think
a secretary of defense ought to rattle it.Even
the usually thoughtful David Ignatius has adopted this line of thought, dictated
by CIA thugs... In his latest column he makes a comparison with nuclear
deterrence in the time of Dwight Eisenhower. Under the doctrine of mutual
assured destruction,
a “bluff” of “frightening the Soviets with the danger of Armageddon” was used to
dissuade them from overrunning Western Europe. “Obama,” says Ignatius, “has a
similar challenge with Iran.”No,
he doesn't. One situation was deterrence of what would have been one of the most
epic acts of aggression in history. The other is an effort to compel a far
lesser country to curtail or give up an avowedly peaceful program, and to do so
by threatening what itself would be an act of naked aggression, a la 2006...
Thomas Schelling has taught us that deterrence and what he called compellence
have significant differences, with the latter generally being harder to
accomplish than the former. And this is in addition to all the other vast
differences in scale, subject matter and morality between nuclear deterrence
during the early Cold War and the current standoff with Iran...or the valiant
Patriotic Resistance of Hezbollah!!!These
and other differences get to one of the problems with the common notion about
threatening military attack in response to Iran not crying uncle at the
conference table: a difficulty in making such a threat credible no matter how
energetic a saber-rattler the secretary of defense might be. This is related
also to the question Mr. Obama posed during the election campaign, about whether
his opponent wanted a new war in the Middle East. At the level of public
sentiment, most Americans do not want to become engaged in a new war in the
Middle East. At the more sophisticated level of policy analysis—if that analysis
is done thoroughly and objectively[6]—such a war would be seen to have enormous costs
and disadvantages. One of those disadvantages would be—as members of the
opposition in Iran have repeatedly warned—to strengthen politically Iranian
hardliners whose position is based partly on implacable hostility from the
United States and who would benefit from a rallying around the flag in response
to foreign attack. Another disadvantage would be the directly counterproductive
one of leading the Iranians to make the decision they probably have not yet
made, which is to build a nuclear weapon.
That last consideration is in turn related to another problem with the notion
about threatening military attack, which concerns the reasons Iranians have for
being interested in nuclear weapons. The chief reason almost certainly involves
the presumed value of such weapons as a deterrent against major, regime-crushing
foreign attack. The more that the brandishing of the threat of military attack
makes such an attack seem likely, the greater will be the Iranian interest in
developing nuclear weapons and the less inclined they will be to make
concessions that would preclude that possibility.
As if all of this were not enough to discard the notion about the efficacy of
saber-rattling, there are the central realities of the nuclear negotiations
themselves and how Tehran perceives them. Inducing the Iranians to concede is
not just a matter of hurting them more. They already are hurting a lot, from the
economic consequences of international sanctions. What is missing from the
negotiations is any reason for them to believe that the hurt will be eased if
they make concessions. The P5+1 have yet to place on the table any proposal that
includes any significant relief from sanctions. Without such an incentive, there
is no reason for the Iranians to cry uncle or even to make lesser concessions,
no matter how much more they are made to hurt.
The Iranians have good reason to be suspicious of ultimate U.S. and Western
motivations, and threats of military force figure into that in an unhelpful way
too. The Iranians do not have to look far to see ample evidence in favor of the
proposition that the primary U.S. goal regarding Iran is regime change. And they
do not have to look far into the past to see a recent U.S. use of military
force—participation in the intervention in Libya—that overthrew a Middle Eastern
regime after it had reached an agreement with the United States to give
up all its nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs. What reason would
Iranian leaders have to make any concessions if they believe the same thing is
likely to happen to them? This is already a problem; rattling the saber only
makes it worse...

Elie, HK RIP we will for ever love you so very much

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..." - Samuel Adams

HK For EVER

RIP For Ever a HERO

Elie , RIP !

With tears in their eyes and flowers in their hands people paid tribute to their national hero. Sad at the loss, which can not be compensated yet pride was all over their faces,sacrificed their son of the soil. His was a death for a noble cause of dying for one's own country. Such men are not born everyday, they belong to the rare class of humanity, who are an example in themselves, and they are the ones who set precedents. Mr. Elie HOBEIKA, HK,is an unprecedented Leader, a Hero, and a Legend for ever.